How to Stay Healthy and Fit During College Semester

Being a college student is no walk in the park. There are plenty of things that require your immediate attention: classes, communities, parties – for many even jobs. It is easy to forget about healthy habits and start drifting. Regrettably, wrong choices can lead to life-damaging outcomes in the future, and now is the best time to prevent this.

Making a decision to stay healthy and well in college is halfway to success. These tips will help you to figure out how to do that.

Build a Healthy Eating Routine

Food is the main source of energy that helps us go through the day, stay active, and focused. For students, their academic progress and productivity largely depend on what they fuel their bodies with. That is why it is crucial to build healthy eating habits that will help you go forward rather than pull you back.

However, when it comes to the idea of eating clean, lots of hindrances and temptations start emerging from nowhere. Different prejudices that surround healthy eating trend doesn’t make things any easier. With that said, students should remember a few simple rules that will serve as a pattern every time they choose what to eat.

Make it regular. Try to stick to regular meals even though it might be really hard for a college student. Of course, it is better to eat every day at a specific hour, but fluctuations within the two-hour range can work as well.

Make sure you receive enough macro and micronutrients. To achieve that, your meals have to be as diverse as possible. Your diet should necessarily contain enough protein, healthy fats, and carbs, as well as enough fruit and veggies as a source of vitamins.

To ensure that, plan your diet for a week or at least for a few days ahead, and try to cook in advance (or plan out where you can order/buy it fast) to offload the busiest days.

Reduce sugar intake. There is nothing wrong with eating something sweet and delicious every now and then. Unfortunately, always busy and hungry students tend to build their entire diet around sugary products, which is bad both for their health and academic performance. Allow yourself cheat-days when you can eat a cake or an ice-cream but overall try to stick to healthier options.

Drink enough clean water. There has been said a lot about the importance of drinking fresh clean water. Drinking water instead of the soda you’re used to may be weird at first, but you will love it after your suddenly improved health and well-being.

Avoid alcohol. You don’t have to get blackout drunk to enjoy the party. No matter how adult and badass it makes you feel, your health should be a top priority. Therefore, try to avoid booze-ups and find joy in other things instead.

Make Time for Regular Exercises

When it comes to working out, people imagine gyms with training machines and heavy equipment galore. In fact, physical activity is about moving your body to prevent early rusting. Not necessarily should it be an hour or two in a special room; you can as well replace it with healthier daily choices like going on foot instead of taking a bus, walking the stairs rather than taking the elevator, or simple morning exercises.  Also, you can fit a few additional short training sessions between classes or extracurricular activities. For example, a lot of stretching and yoga you-tube and Instagram bloggers offer numerous free training routines of different duration that can be done with or without equipment. If you are really committed to being healthy in college, you might want to review your daily schedule and look for time-eaters that you can replace with exercising.

Get Enough Sleep

Never. Sacrifice. Sleep. You should carve this rule in your memory and try to follow it regularly if you want to be healthy – and academically successful.

If you have ever pulled all-nighters (of course, you have), you should have noticed that your learning productivity was decreasing exponentially as you were getting more and more tired. It happened because human brain capacity is limited; it needs time to sort and process information which means that all-nighter learning makes no sense.

And while your internal voice tells you that having normal sleep is impossible in college, consider the following student cheats that actually can help you with that:

First and foremost, develop a schedule to visualize your activities and stay on top of your time. You should include important dates, deadlines, events, classes, etc. to have a clear understanding of how you allocate your time. And of course, prioritize eight hours of night sleep. Most likely, you will find time gaps that you don’t use quite efficiently, so you can readjust it for something else – like power naps for one.

Also, you can follow Alison’s example and delegate a certain share of your work to someone else:

“I know professors think that using medical school personal statement writing service  to complete a student’s assignment for them is cheating. But medical school is hell: it’s either my health or some stupid writing. My future patients need a healthy doctor that can focus on treating them rather than solving personal health problems.’

And finally, you may try studying more efficiently to gain more in less time. Try to remove distractions, use the Pomodoro technique, or special time-managing and productivity-boosting apps. Give it your best shot.

Take Care about Your Mental Health

Staying mentally healthy and confident during a stressful college semester might be a real challenge but you should give it a try. Surround yourself with supportive people who can give you a helping hand in the time of need, spend more time in the open air and around nature, allow yourself small joys to stay optimistic and upbeat.

And most importantly, remember that life doesn’t consist of college studies alone. So try to make it as vibrant as you can.